Airplane seatbelt extenders and the quiet ask
A court reporter who can take down anyone's words couldn't get one sentence out in row 23. The flight to meet her first grandchild, and the one she took a year later.
This is a composite story. Names and personal details are invented and combined from real experiences people in this community have shared.
Personal experiences are individual and aren’t medical advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your own health.
The belt came up about two inches short, and Lorraine Haddad held the two ends over her lap for a moment, as if they might change their minds.
Row 23, window. The man in the middle seat already had his earbuds in and was studying the safety card with the focus of someone reading a will. In the jet bridge she had rehearsed a sentence, Hi, could I get an extender when you have a second, with no apology and no explanation, the way a travel forum had advised her at one in the morning. She'd meant to say it at the door. But the flight attendant at the door had been talking to the pilot, and the line had nudged her past, and now here she was, holding two halves of a buckle that would not meet while thirty more people came down the aisle.
She was fifty-eight. She had been a court reporter for twenty-nine years. She could take down two attorneys talking over each other at a speed that made judges call a recess, and she could not get one sentence out of her mouth in row 23.
The ask
She pressed the call button. The chime was quieter than she'd feared and louder than she'd hoped.
The flight attendant who came was maybe twenty-five, with a long braid, and she leaned in before Lorraine could start and said, very low, "Extender?" Lorraine nodded. The young woman came back a minute later with a length of belt folded in her hand and passed it down by the armrest, like a note in class. Nobody saw. The man in the middle seat kept reading his will.
It was kind. Lorraine would think about that later, how kind it was, how practiced, how clearly this young woman did it many times a day. The kindness was almost the hard part. She clicked the extender into the belt, laid her cardigan over her lap, and watched the baggage carts out the window for the whole taxi.
She was flying to Tucson to meet her first grandchild.
A week on the floor
The baby was named Sami, after Lorraine's father. He was eleven days old and furious about it.
Her daughter, Nadia, was running on no sleep, and Lorraine had come to help, and she did help. She washed bottles and folded onesies and walked Sami through a four a.m. that seemed to last a month. But the apartment was on the third floor with no elevator, and every trip down to the car with the diaper bag left her stopped on the second landing with a hand on the rail, pretending to check her phone. And everything with babies happens on the floor. Getting down to the play mat was fine. Getting up was a production, one hand on the couch and one on the coffee table, with a noise she didn't know she made until Nadia imitated it, lovingly, and they both laughed until Sami woke up.
At night on the pullout couch she ran the history she always ran. She'd lost weight before, more times than she liked to count. The best was in her forties, when she lost sixty pounds with a program and a food scale and kept it off for almost two years, until a trial that ran nine months and a divorce that ran longer. She knew how to lose it. She had just never once kept it.
Sami would be walking in a year. He'd want to climb those stairs.
The flight home
On the way home she said the sentence at the door. She said it to a flight attendant with short gray hair, and it came out steady, and the woman just nodded. There was an extender waiting on her seat when she got to row 17.
Lorraine noticed she didn't feel much of anything, and she thought she knew why. She'd decided something on the pullout couch the night before.
She called her doctor's office from the airport parking lot.
Slowly, for once
It went differently this time because she let it be slow. Her doctor, who had known her for fifteen years, didn't hand her a program. They went through the whole history, the two good years and what ended them, and built a plan out of things they researched together. On every break she walked the long third-floor hallway of the county courthouse instead of sitting in the reporters' lounge. She stopped weighing her food and started paying attention to how she felt at four in the afternoon, which in her line of work is when the testimony gets long.
Anyone who has done this before knows the second month, when nothing moves. There's an accountant who kept a whole spreadsheet of it. Lorraine kept a transcript, naturally. One line a day, in steno, that no one else on earth could read.
Row 9
Sami turned one in April, and Lorraine flew out again.
She had the sentence ready in the jet bridge, because she wasn't sure, and she thought she might always keep it ready. She found row 9, aisle, sat down, and pulled the two halves of the belt across her lap, and they met. The buckle clicked. There was a tail of strap left over, and she pulled it snug and tucked the end under her hip.
Before takeoff the flight attendant came down the aisle checking laps, glancing left and right. She looked at Lorraine's belt for no longer than she looked at anyone's, and kept walking.
Two days later, on the third floor in Tucson, Lorraine got down on the play mat with Sami, and when it was time, she got back up, one hand on the couch, mostly out of habit.